The VOIP Provider Guide

With the collapse and sudden closure of SunRocket, more than 200,000 VoIP subscribers woke up and found their phone service unceremoniously turned off. The result has left many customers with a bad taste in their mouth and set the tech community ablaze with rumors as to why a company with yearly growth and a decent user base shut its doors overnight.  However, on the flipside of things, companies like VoIP Your Life have stepped up to ensure that customers still willing to stay with VoIP phone service are given the opportunity to quickly and easily transfer their number and services with minimal interruptions.

  All of the existing features, reviewed previously here, are intact, including the Virtual Phone Numbers, free hardware and porting, all steps above the service these users enjoyed while with SunRocket. The existing adaptors from SunRocket do not work with VoIP Your Life’s service, though they do provide a new one for free after shipping costs. VoIP Your Life has also made it possible to receive the adaptor and necessary hardware with enhanced shipping services for former SunRocket customers with no additional cost. While portability of a former SunRocket phone number is not guaranteed VoIP Your Life offers a service to verify all numbers and locations that it can port. They have made it easier than most of other services to prove that you had previous service and that the number you are porting is from a transfer to VoIP Your Life from SunRocket. For that reason, VoIP Your Life has offered one of the more appealing service plans for prospective transferred users. 

There is no special discount from VoIP Your Life; however they do extend all of their existing special offers including the free hardware, number porting and virtual numbers. Additionally, the contracts that many users signed and prepaid with SunRocket do not exist with VoIP Your Life, thankfully cutting out any chance of users being shorted on their service if something happens.   Most importantly, VoIP Your Life has established a specific FAQ for former SunRocket users to learn more about the transfer of service and the possible changes that might entail. Though there is a definite anger among those 200,000 users who were ignored so easily, many companies have done their best to pick up the pieces. Whether companies like VoIP Your Life and VIA Talk are truly trying to help old customers or snag easy new customers for their service is up to the customers to decide. Ultimately, the repercussions of the SunRocket debacle are still being discussed and felt out by the VoIP community. It remains to be seen whether there will be a service backlash over their collapse. However, as the Yankee Group recently reported, regardless of technical or legal problems, VoIP service continues to grow.

The numbers are always an entertaining way to look at and evaluate the current VoIP trends, even if they tend to contradict what the public image of companies like SunRocket and Vonage is creating. However, as with any new technology, these are simply wrinkles that need to be worked out before the technology can truly flourish.

So say the numbers anyways. Mainly because of the support of cable television and internet companies like Comcast, VoIP service – usually bundled together with internet packages – has grown dramatically. At first wary of the fledgling technology, Comcast and other major cable companies have started bundling digital calling packages and have been selling them in droves.

The numbers tell the story; VoIP access via cable providers grew 167 percent 2006 to almost 6.3 million users from 3.9. The Yankee Group, a technology watchdog group, expects that number to jump to almost 26.2 million by 2011. The main issue though, according to the Yankee Group is that most users are unaware of how their new phone service works. The same surveys found that only 10 percent of Cable VoIP subscribers were aware that their phone service was now powered via the internet.

As for the companies that have managed to gather the most users in the VoIP field, Comcast has jumped to the top of the ladder with nearly 2.4 million subscribers, boasting an increase of over 800 percent. The increase was enough to take over the top spot from the previous VoIP leader, Vonage, whose recent woes and legal battles with Verizon have left the company weakened.

The main problem that companies like Vonage, which still managed to gain 1.2 million customers in 2006, are facing is that each new customer costs the company somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. This startup cost for the company, including advertising, expansion and line maintenance, is likely part of the reason SunRocket collapsed so easily despite the 200,000 plus customers.

Regardless of recent woes though, the Yankee Group sees increase growth in Broadband VoIP, expecting as many as 6.4 million users by 2011. One of the major sources of possible growth lies in new technology such as FTTH VoIP, which relies of fiber projects being implemented by Verizon and AT&T, looking to replace old copper wiring systems.

Comcast was not the only cable company to see growth in 2006 either. Time Warner managed to increase their subscription base by 750,000 to 1.86 million customers and Cablevision now has 1.2 million subscribers to their VoIP service.

Regardless of the current state of things, the future looks bright for VoIP. Companies will likely learn from current mistakes and start protecting their investments a little more carefully, bundling their services and overcoming the current spat between so many companies and patent issues. Regardless of what they project, VoIP will likely outdistance itself as the technology slowly begins to settle, very similarly to how the internet’s growing pains in the late 1990s finally smoothed out and produced today’s Search and Social Networking giants.

Even with the recent implosion of Sun Rocket, a VoIP service that boasted more than 200,000 users, and the soon to be collapse of Vonage, a service that at one time trumpeted the arrival of the next generation of telephone technology, startup company Ooma is poised to make the jump into the market with a  fresh take on phone service.

Their “new take” on phone service involves combining the solid security of land line telephone service and the less expensive, more versatile technology of VoIP into a single service with a one-time fee of only $399. To be sure, services like Packet 8 and Vonage have a varying degree of advantage over traditional phone service. The bills are cheaper, the service more versatile and the calls equally as clear.

However, the reliance on electricity, poor emergency services and unknown quantities of a startup company in a crowded market have kept many people firmly attached to their landline service. With Ooma, the option to obtain both the security and safety of a landline with the versatility of VoIP is on the horizon.

Basically, you make a single one-time payment and receive your Ooma hub. This machine works as a central connection to your landline, phone and computer. You keep your phone number and get a new digital number for use on your computer and remote calling access. To be fair, the initial payment is a large investment, but Ooma is banking on the fact that you will never pay another monthly bill, except for the monthly emergency service fees levied by your local government.

Okay, it sounds great right? Well, the technology being used to get all of this accomplished at such an amazingly low cost is not quite as great as we could hope. The call routing system encased in that Ooma hub is actually a simple P2P network interface. P2P has been around for a while now and is recognized as the ideal method of transferring files. However, it is also recognized for a complete lack of built in security and infamously poor ability to stop attacks.

The calls from other users are routed through each hub in each Ooma customers home; therefore anyone within the Ooma network could gain access to your hub if they had the time, malice and ability. There is no current way to know for sure that Ooma’s claims about the hub’s security will actually pan out.

For now, Ooma is engaging in a preliminary beta process to ensure their product works as they’ve advertised it. It looks as though the product will hit the market sometime in the coming 3 to 4 months, however it is still unknown how well it will perform and whether Ooma will, as they’ve claimed, be able to control the P2P traffic routed through each hub. If it does though, their service is an interesting concept that could very well open up a new avenue for VoIP services that are having trouble staying afloat in a crowded, cost riddled market.

It’s not something that anyone necessarily wants to talk about, but with the growth of VoIP technology and the takeover of many telecommunications features by IP based services, the risk of security breaches and hacking grows as well. Traditionally, telephones have had issues with tapping and listening in, but it was done on a much lower level, utilizing the outdated technology that current phone systems still use.

With the advent of digital phone service, telecommunications becomes just as at risk as any other aspect of digital security. Eavesdropping, service interruptions and stolen calls are all possible risks of VoIP service. There are however methods to protect against each of these risks.

Denial of Service
Denial of Service is as simple with VoIP networks as it is with existing data networks. The most traditionally method used by hackers to take down a data network is simply to overload it with too many packets, forcing the network to crash and shutdown in response. This method does not always work as some networks have safeguards against it, but it will often cause lower performance rates regardless. 

Flooding
Another method to take down a VoIP network is to send SIP packets, those that are designed to open a new call connection, in mass quantity from a fake IP address. The system will eventually overload and fill up with the fake requests, making it impossible to take actual call requests.

Because the fake IP address doesn’t actually exist, it cannot return the packet that starts the phone call and the process never completes, leaving those SIP packets to sit until they expire. There are ways to keep this kind of attack from happening though. Programs and guides exist that describe exactly how you go about changing your queue size and how long it takes for a request to time out. You can also install firewalls designed to block such packets from unknown or stagnant IP addresses. The firewall itself must be capable of recognizing and scanning SIP messages.

Terminating Calls
A hacker can use the same techniques described above to actually terminate a call you’re in the middle of whenever they want. By inserting specific messages that tell the VoIP protocols to end the call or hangup, they can stop the call at any point. There are programs, such as SIP-Kill that will actively do this for a hacker without them actually needing to understand how the process works.

For that reason, it’s easy for them to attack your calls. However, it’s also easy to protect against it by using an encryption program or service to keep the protocols from view. The right software will check and authenticate all packets before they are allowed, keeping simple attacks to a minimum.

Stealing a Phone Call
This is a problem that people are likely more worried about than anything else. Instead of eavesdropping, a hacker can actually steal a phone call entirely from a VoIP user. In the registrar database where the IP addresses are kept for incoming and outgoing phone calls, a hacker can easily take a look and change the address to gain access to either end of these calls. They simply reroute where the call signal is being sent and voila, they’ve stolen your phone call.

There are numerous methods of encryption that keep this type of attack from happening. Simple SIP encryption goes a long way to ward off simple hacking programs, but for businesses and the like out there, a more complicated security feature such as Transport Layer Security will go a long ways toward keeping your packets safe.

What These Risks Actually Mean
Obviously these problems are going to be few and far between for most standard end users. If you are a regular user in the suburbs of

For those that have jumped on board the VoIP revolution, it’s a revelation to find that you can easily add functionality and new features to your service with a quick download. There are VoIP startups littered throughout the internet trying to carve out a niche of their own by offering specialized features for maps, blogs, cell phones and stores. Therefore, there are a few features on the market now that you can download and utilize in conjunction with your VoIP service to enhance your overall service.

Web Conferencing
For a long time it was a pay only service, but with the advent of services like Yugma, it’s possible to access and utilize web conferencing services for free. Yugma’s service allows you to have up to 10 people in a conference at any given time, viewing a single document or program in use. The program works between different platforms, connecting PCs and Macs and combining numerous other technologies such as Linux. Yugma is amazing because it can be used and installed on blogs, stores and student web pages for instant collaboration.

Microblogging and Text Blasting
It’s a tiny niche, but it’s proven to be ridiculously popular thus far. Services such as Twitter allow you to easily and quickly send a text message through their site to dozens of friends, your Myspace page or to a blog widget with up to 140 characters describing what you’re up to. It’s a very simple service that basically allows people to inform all of their friends of what they’re doing without calling them or texting them individually. Look for this kind of service to expand in the future as well.

Click to Call Plugins and Widgets
In the last two or three years, the internet has exploded into a massive network of connections and constant communication. However, it’s been all text up until now. With the advent of simple, click to call widgets on your blog page or social network, it’s easier than ever to view someone’s profile, talk to them directly or leave a voice comment with the click of a mouse. It’s a burgeoning technology but new services such as Jaxtr and Direct CallBack are offering features that are far ahead of their time.

The ability to offer a call location on your computer to a blog or shopping site without actually giving out your home phone number or to have a widget that users can click on and call directly through to a cell phone are extremely popular and spreading rapidly.

Digital Switchboards
With the use of existing VoIP technology and programming, companies like GrandCentral are making it possible to actually control which phone and phone number a call rings through to when you receive a call. The program first accepts a call and shows you who is calling. You’re given one of three choices; take the call, send it to voicemail or use one of the special GrandCentral features.

These features include the ability to record the call while taking it or to listen to a voicemail as it is being left, providing the ability to screen calls in real time. During the listening in you can choose to take the call as well. Think of it like an old tape recording answering machine, only digital.

Along with advanced voice mail organization options, GrandCentral offers numerous features that take full advantage of the hybrid features of telecommunications and internet access.

The Cell Phone
The cell phone is the next step in the evolution of VoIP. Along with Mobile VoIP access, which we’ve covered at length in the past, cellular phones and WiFi access will make it possible utilize IP technology to send text messages, take calls from a web page, make free international phone calls through call back services and who knows what other features they’re currently dreaming up.

While the VoIP market continues to grow and boom, it’s the applications you can attach to that service that make it truly amazing. With the kind of functions that we could only have dreamt of 3 years ago, the worlds of communications are colliding at record pace. Soon enough, everything will run through the same lines and be fully integrated. It’s just a matter of how they decide to do it.